What is Writer?

What Is Writer?

Writer is the word processor component of Apache OpenOffice. In addition to the usual features of a word processor (spelling check, thesaurus, hyphenation, autocorrect, find and replace, automatic generation of tables of contents and indexes, mail merge and others), Writer provides these important features:

• Templates and styles (see Chapter 2)
• Page layout methods, including frames, columns, and tables
• Embedding or linking of graphics, spreadsheets, and other objects
• Built-in drawing tools
• Master documents to group a collection of documents into a single document
• Change tracking during revisions
• Database integration, including a bibliography database
• Export to PDF, including bookmarks (see Chapter 9)
• And many more

These features are covered in detail in the Writer Guide.

Inserting Dashes and Non-breaking Spaces and Hyphens

To prevent two words from being separated at the end of a line, press  Ctrl  +  ⇧ Shift  +  space bar  after the first word to insert a non-breaking space.

In cases where you do not want the hyphen to appear at the end of a line, for example in a number such as 123–4567, you can press  Ctrl  +  ⇧ Shift  +  -  to insert a non-breaking hyphen.

To enter en and em dashes, you can use the Replace dashes option on the Options tab under Tools → AutoCorrect Options. This option replaces two hyphens, under certain conditions, with the corresponding dash.

– is an en-dash; that is, a dash the width of the letter “n” in the font you are using. Type at least one character, a space, one or two hyphens, another space, and at least one more letter, then a space. The one or two hyphens will be replaced by an en-dash.

— is an em-dash; that is, a dash the width of the letter “m” in the font you are using. Type at least one character, two hyphens, and at least one more character, then a space. The two hyphens will be replaced by an em-dash.

The key difference is that an en-dash is written with spaces around it and an em-dash is not. See the Help for more details. For other methods of inserting dashes, see the Writer Guide.